


Five Things Alex Hates About Hank (and all the things he doesn’t)

by meeks00



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-17
Updated: 2011-08-17
Packaged: 2017-10-22 17:42:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/240798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meeks00/pseuds/meeks00
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“The blue one was mine,” Hank concludes. He sets both tubes back in the rack with the others. “Not everything needs to explode for it to be ruined, Alex,” he says.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Things Alex Hates About Hank (and all the things he doesn’t)

**Author's Note:**

> Random fic! For the shiny new fandom.

i. Handwriting

This guy’s handwriting, Alex thinks absently, glancing at the chalk board in the downstairs lab. It’s all thin, slanted curves written in perfectly straight lines with tiny scrawls of notes in between and in the margins. It’s neat and solid, but stupid and impossible to read.

Alex looks down and begins tapping the funky-shaped test tubes on the steel table like xylophone keys to get their contents to swirl. Each of them are two-tiered, a clear layer above a heavy, cloudy one. From blue to yellow to orange, they’re each a different color. He wonders which combinations might cause explosions.

“Don’t touch that.”

Alex turns, and there’s the super geek himself, glasses askew and lab coat perfectly ironed as he wanders in. Hank heads straight for the chalk board and swipes at the numbers and variables with the eraser, as if they’re legible enough for Alex to understand what they might mean.

There go the tall sweeps of meaningful chalked letters and numbers with each broad swipe of the eraser. For all that Hank can’t help but design new things, he seems to always do his best to hide any trace of what he comes up with.

“What,” Alex asks, picking up two of the test tubes. “These?” On a whim, he pours the blue one into the red one and is kind of pissed off when nothing explodes in his face.

Hank turns, stares at the resultant mixture in the tube Alex swirls around. “Those had diluted, PCR-ed, centrifuged samples of our DNA,” he says lightly. With anyone else, Alex thinks he might’ve gotten a verbal lashing for his actions.

“Whose what?”

“You’re not stupid, Alex,” Hank replies on a sigh. He nudges his glasses up to rub at the bridge of his nose. “DNA.”

Insulted by the way that only Hank with his stupid glasses and stupid science vocabulary can make him feel, Alex stares into the tube. “I kind of wanted it to explode,” he says.

For some reason, he feels like he should have had a better explanation.

It’s no secret that Hank works around the clock with Charles trying figure out how to help them all control their powers, that he spends whatever free time he has left trying to find ways to hide his own.

Alex feels a strange pang of guilt forcontaminating something that might’ve been useful for either one, but he hadn’t really thought of it before now.

He covers by saying, “Got anything flammable?”

Hank resettles his glasses on his nose and walks over, long legs bringing him a step away from where Alex stands dumbly by the rack. Hank plucks the test tubes away, and his hands are cold, hard, probably from sequestering himself down here in the basement labs all day. Alex would tell him that isolation isn’t healthy, but what would he know?

“The red one was yours,” Hank says, following the same train of thought despite the distraction Alex hoped to create.

Hank holds the tube up and looks at the mixture in the light. The blue is proliferating through the red in strange, uneven wisps.

“The blue one was mine,” Hank concludes. He sets both tubes back in the rack with the others. “Not everything needs to explode for it to be ruined, Alex,” he says.

When he turns to one of his little machines, Alex stares at the rack, then at the chalk-cloudy board, and he finds that he can’t think of anything else to say.

He forgets why he came here in the first place anyway, so he leaves.

__

ii. Running

He sees them sprinting around the manor dressed in the gray sweats Charles ordered for all of them like stupid training uniforms.

Even Hank’s out of his lab coat. He looks a little bit like he’s playing dress-up in casual clothes, though they’re not actually ill-fitting. When they run, they’re matched stride-for-stride, and Alex knows with spark of anger that Hank is holding back.

The first round he runs at a normal pace, but that’s because he has his shoes on, double-knotted so his Sasquatch feet don’t pop out at the wrong time or something. It’s one of the stupidest things about Hank, for all that he’s one of the smartest people Alex has ever met.

The second time, the shoes come off, toes spreading into long, jointed appendages on the walkway. Hank sighs like he can breathe again.

And he’s fast — mutant-fast, of course.

When he runs, this time, he grins. Alex only sees him speed up and slow down, the in-between a flash of a moment only Hank knows. He runs with his back straight, proper as if he can’t let go for one minute, even though he’s surpassing Charles on the makeshift track.

Alex wonders if it’s the same for Hank as it is for him. There’s the build, and the pressure, and then the release. He assumes it’s not the same at all. Alex’s release always means destruction. Hank just gets to places faster.

Charles laughs when Hank taps his shoulder from behind. Hank’s answering smile is reserved, if not entirely apologetic. _I’m sorry I ran so much faster than you,_ his grin seems to say.

Alex presses his lips together and walks up to them. “Impressive, Hank,” he says.

Hank grins at him, all white teeth and elation and a never-ending pool of goodwill, and a light feeling seeps into Alex too when there’s no reason for it, not really.

He can’t even control the force of his power, let alone aim it at anything worthwhile, and his session with the professor is next, which always ends in a fucking disaster.

So he says, “Feet like those, all you need is a red nose. Right, bozo?”

Hank stops smiling, and Alex loses that lighter feeling like a torch going out. “I’m done here,” Hank says.

And Alex hates him then, hates him for walking away, for tying his shoes and covering it all up so easily; he hates him, undeservedly, for the fact that all Alex can do in turn is look upon wreckage and claim fault.

He doesn’t look after Hank or reply, because he has nothing left to say and there’s nothing else he wants to see there, not when the bulk of it is hidden away as if it never existed in the first place.

“Thank you, Alex,” says Charles, every inch the disappointed guardian, and Alex feels, unsurprisingly, like a piece of shit — nothing different about today than any other, if he’s honest about it.

As he walks away, he feels the professor’s eyes on his back as he stalks off, but then it’s Charles’ touch seeping into his mind, spreading a wash of unjustifiable sympathy over him. It feels light too, like someone _knows_ , and Charles undoubtedly does, but it’s not enough.

Afterward, Alex still doesn’t feel any fucking better.

__

iii. Bed-side manner

The thing is, Alex is easily susceptible to fevers. In his foster homes, it meant he could stay home from school or be quarantined from the other kids. In prison, it meant they gave him placebos and tossed him out into the recess yard anyway to fight the cold or the heat or just fucking perfect weather in addition to the other inmates.

Here, it means Charles sends him to bed, Erik gives him soup still sealed in the can, Raven extra throws pillows at his face, and Darwin pats his back about sixty times.

And then, of course, Hank comes in and bends over him with a stethoscope, a tray of needles and things nearby like torture tools.

“Oh, come on,” Alex says around the thermometer jabbed into his mouth. “I’ll be fine tomorrow. If you just go down to the kitchen and heat this up for me, I’m sure I’ll be fine in no time.” He waves the can of soup in Hank’s face.

“You’ve been avoiding Charles,” Hank says, drawing the stethoscope away from Alex’s wrist.

Alex’s grip on the can tightens. He feels it heat up beneath his palm — an abnormal heat; too much heat. He puts it down on the bedside table, watches the paper label smoke. Hank stares at it. “What did you say?”

“You’ve been avoiding your lessons with Charles,” Hank repeats. He takes the thermometer from Alex’s mouth. “Wow. 148 degrees.” When he looks up, it’s like he’s made his point and is telling Alex to suck it.

“It’s a little high. So what?” Alex says with a forced laugh. He lies back and draws his hands behind his head on the mountain of pillows. “Quit fussing.”

“It’s more than just ‘a little high.’ 98.7 is a little high. 148 is _dangerous,_ and it could kill you one day.”

Alex rolls his eyes. “I’m going to start calling you ‘drama queen’ if you keep talking like — ”

“I mean it, Alex,” Hank cuts in impatiently, setting the thermometer aside with a clack onto the bedside table. “You could kill yourself if you keep holding back like this.”

At that, Alex sits back up and points at Hank’s face. “Who’s fucking holding back? You put your shoes on every morning like they’re part of a Superman costume, Hank. Like you’re saving the world from seeing your big stupid feet. Big fucking deal! I let go for one minute and I tear down buildings — with goddamn people still inside them! So why don’t you shut your fucking mouth and quit holding back _your-fucking-self._ ”

Hank is staring down at his feet — at his carefully laced up and double-knotted shoes.

Alex grabs the thermometer from the table and throws it as hard as he can against the wall. Even that mild movement of his body is enough to whip a string of red light at the wall. The wallpaper is sliced into perfectly, leaving a flaming line.

The thermometer is gone, probably up in smoke.

Hank doesn’t look at him when he says, “I’ll run some more tests.” He gets up and slaps at the small flames on the wallpaper before he walks out.

When he’s gone, Alex stares at the fire-curled paper against the singed wall. It’s still smoking.

“Fuck,” he says. “Fuck.”

He feels better already, just from that. But it makes him feel sick.

__

iv. Brains

“You hit all the mannequins, last time,” Hank says around a mouthful of insulated wires.

Alex hops up on one of the lab benches. “I also hit the rest of the bunker, in case you didn’t notice.”

Hank’s lips quirk up in a small sideways grin. “I might’ve noticed that too,” he said. “Just trying to look on the bright side, here.”

Alex looks at the board, new equations and notes scrawled in that tall, thin curving script. “Circles of fire not enough ‘bright side,’ for you?”

At that, Hank just rolls his eyes. “C’mere. See if this fits.”

It’s a vest with what looks like a target on the front, and it looks stupid. “Where’s the spandex?” he asks, but he hops off the bench anyway because Hank’s like a kid with his new inventions.

“Just try it on, Alex.”

Alex sighs like it’s a chore, but he starts pulling the target on.

Hank stops him, saying, “Shirt off first.”

Eyeing him in amusement, Alex drops the vest on the bench and reaches for the hem of his tee. “Kinky, Hank.”

Between pulling off his shirt and tugging the vest on, Alex is sure he misses another eye-roll.

“You know, you’re the second person to say that to me lately.”

Alex inserts the straps across the front. “Oh yeah? Who was the first?” He’s sure it’s Raven, and he shoves the clasps together a bit too hard at the thought.

“Erik.” Hank shakes his head, blushing, and Alex drops his hands. “It was — never mind. I think he’s a little deranged.”

“Hm,” Alex says noncommittally. Normally, he’d agree with that, but he’s not going to voice it out loud after the man just shoved Cassidy off a huge-ass satellite.

“You made this, huh? Out of scratch?”

Hank scoffs, picking up a notepad. “If expensive and hard-to-come-by materials are scratch, then yes.”

“Bozo,” Alex says.

Hank rolls his eyes. “Should I call Charles in?”

Alex looks down at the round plate over his sternum. “Not yet. Let’s — can we just — ”

Hank shrugs easily, like it’s no big deal, and, for some reason, Alex can’t look at him after that. “Sure,” Hank says.

Alex doesn’t thank him, because he can’t, because he doesn’t have those words. He just nods in response and leads the way to the bunker, trying to walk steady, as if he’s not worried that things will end like they always do.

Hank stands outside the doors, and Alex feels the weight of the plate over his chest warm up as he summons the energy.

Afterward, he lets the heat lick at his skin as he watches the flames rise in the familiar swirl design. It’s a pattern he’s used to, by now, and the thought makes him sick with how empty he is after it’s made.

He shoves the doors open, pushing Hank aside with the force, and stalks straight out.

“I’ll get it right, Alex,” Hank says after him. “Alex, I can fix this. I’ll fix it. Don’t worry,” he says, stumbling after him with the fire extinguisher, his lab coat already turning brown from the flames alighting into the hallway.

Alex spins around and pushes Hank away. “I came broken, already, you idiot! There’s nothing _to_ fix!”

“I meant — I mean, I’ll help,” Hank says.

But Alex is already walking away — breathing too fast, still burning too hot — and Hank doesn’t come after him with anything else.

__

v. Everything

“I hate you,” Alex says, shoving him roughly. “I fucking hate you.”

“I bet I could prove I hate you more,” Hank replies, head-butting him. Alex jerks away in surprise and clutches his nose, but by the expression on Hank’s face, it hurt him more. The idiot.

He kicks Hank’s shin and ducks under a wide punch with a laugh. “Oh yeah? Try me.” He kicks the other skinny-ass shin just because he can, and because it’s kind of funny.

“Ow!”

“Come on. Tell me what it is about me that drives you up the fucking wall,” he goads, pivoting and shoving Hank in the back when yet another punch goes wide. This kid doesn’t know the first thing about fighting, but he’s persistent if anything. “I bet you have a list with bullet points and encyclopedia facts or some shit. Lay it on me, McCoy.”

Hank trips over his long legs and turns, and he stares for a moment at Alex, his face red and chest heaving. “You act like you’re a monster. A _beast,_ ” he finally spits out, swiping blood from his cut lip with the pad of his thumb. “It’s like you want to prove you’re just as big an asshole as your mutation makes you, but you’re not, and — and I think that’s even _worse._ ”

“Hey, hypocrite,” Alex say back, laughing to cover the tug in his gut. The new target plate over his chest burns hot against his skin. “You’re one to talk about covering up when you’re the one with the size 13 shoes!”

Hank shakes his head, straightening to his full height. “You won’t even _try,_ because if it doesn’t work, you’ll what — fail? Cause an accident? Get over yourself, Alex. Who here thinks you’re supposed to be perfect? You’re the one who was in prison when Charles and Erik got you. _No one_ expects you to be fucking perfect!”

“ _Fuck_ you,” he hisses. Of all the people he thought would throw his prison sentence in his face, Alex had thought Hank would be the last of them. “You shut your fucking mouth.”

“You don’t even have to use it all the time, your power,” Hank says, “just enough so you don’t make yourself sick with the pent up energy, but you can’t even handle that!”

Hank’s glasses are gone, Alex notices distantly, balling his fists together. Heat gathers in his chest.

“It’s like you’re trying to kill yourself with your power. And you know what? That’s pitiful. You’re so _pathetic!_ ”

“I’m not!” Alex screams back.

He feels like he’s going to puke, with Hank standing there against the wall talking about prison and accidents and suicide and pity, and he explodes. He explodes outward because he’s made it this far. He’s survived even with this, even with _this_ , and the world alights behind his eyes red cutting energy that is focused and centered, hot hot hot. He can feel the rings spinning frantically in his chest, building together, forming an uncontainable pressure — and then release.

Afterward, he stares at the black circle on the wall, exactly where Hank stood, and promptly begins dry-heaving over his shoes.

He drops to his knees, feeling empty even though his stomach upended nothing but the rings of red fire through the stupid target on his chest, and he only looks up when he hears a strangled sound.

Hank is there below the scorched splotch, sitting against the wall with his legs drawn up, and his stupid split lip bleeding again, and he’s laughing like an idiot. “It works,” he says between laughs, staring at Alex and squinting because he doesn’t have his glasses on. “It fucking works!”

Alex presses a hand to his own chest, feels only the barest warmth of the residual energy. He feels lighter, but not quite empty. “You’re crazy,” he replies, voice flat. “You’re a lunatic. Hank, you really, really are.”

Hank’s blinding grin is enough to prove the words true. “We need to show Charles,” he says in a rush. He pauses. “Preferably against the mannequins, though,” he adds with another laugh.

And Alex can’t help it then when he laughs too.

__

vi. Nothing

“The fucking glasses,” says Alex, laughing.

Hank growls when he glances over his shoulder.

Alex doesn’t stop tossing popcorn into his blue fur. “Your mutation — you can withstand freezing temperatures with all that hair and probably throw cars and scratch stick figures into metal, but your mutation doesn’t fix your sucky eyesight.” He sets down the bowl and comes just within reach. “Come on, Beast. That’s fucking hilarious and you know it.”

Hank swipes a broad hand — paw — over his head, showering popcorn pieces down the back of his shirt. “I think I prefer ‘bozo’ to ‘Beast.’”

“Yeah. And that means what to me, exactly?”

Hank sighs. “Nothing, I guess.”

“Damn straight.” Alex looks at the bowl of popcorn. He hadn’t really been hungry when he made it, but Hank’s hair seemed soft and like it could keep anything and never let it go. There are still a few pieces to the back of his head, so Alex inches forward on the couch so his knees are barely touching Hank’s back. “Don’t pick me up and throw me at anything, dude, OK? But you’ve got shit in your hair.”

Hank looks back at him warily, and though his eyes have a bit of yellow in them, they still look the same as they did before. But Alex doesn’t say so.

“Wow,” Hank says dryly, turning to face the TV again. “I wonder how that happened.”

“Beats me,” Alex replies, reaching out.

It is soft.

It’s soft, except the strands are coarse and thick. He half expects the blue to come off on his fingers like a stain, but it doesn’t, and though the popcorn kernels stayed stuck, they come out just as easily.

“Just how many pieces did you throw at me?” Hank asks after a while. His voice is lower than it used to be, a hint of a baritone there now, vibrating through the rest of him, into Alex’s fingers.

Alex pulls his hand away once he realizes he’s been running it through Hank’s hair, but he replaces it again when Hank ducks his head down, as if giving permission. “You’re lucky it wasn’t the whole bowl,” Alex replies, keeping his voice steady over thoughts of soft soft soft.

“You’re so weird,” Hank says suddenly, pulling away and turning to look at him.

“Says the blue man!” Alex replies, caught off guard enough to become defensive.

Hank shakes his head. “No, I mean — you’re a lot nicer, now that I’m a real freak of nature.”

Surprised, Alex shoves at Hank’s head.

“Ow. What — ”

“You were always a freak of nature, bozo. And you’re an idiot for not realizing it before.”

Hank stares at him, his pupils dilating. So easy to see now, with the yellow in the blue.

“Seriously,” Alex goes on. “Real freak of nature. Not so much now.” He pokes Hank’s face again and gets swatted for his trouble. It actually kind of hurts, but Hank’s still coming to terms with his new strength, so Alex lets it slide, just this once.

“Come on, Alex. Don’t fucking patronize me.” Hank moves as if to stand, and Alex clamps his hands down on his shoulders to keep him in place.

“No, look.” Alex thinks for a moment, because he’s not sure what to say except that Hank’s a real Grade-A idiot for all that he seems to know everything about everything else. “You just — you used to hide it, before. All the time.”

“The freak side? Yeah, thanks.”

“No! I mean, yeah. And now you can’t. Hide it, that is.”

Hank looks away. Alex drops down onto the floor next to him, punches his shoulder. Hank glares at him.

“It’s good,” Alex tells him, like it’s not something Hank should already know. He punches Hank’s shoulder again. “Blue’s a good color for you.”

Hank eyes him carefully for a minute, and Alex reaches up to rub the back of his neck under the scrutiny. Then Hank smiles, and Alex can’t help it that he grins back when he sees that familiar the row of white teeth.

“You’re not bad, Summers,” Hank says. He punches Alex on the shoulder, which causes Alex to bend over himself and grip the spot with taut fingers.

“Ow, you fuck! _Christ!_ ” Alex chokes out indignantly, but he’s laughing. And Hank just laughs louder.

  
 _fin_   



End file.
